


I Choose You

by infinite_regress



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Kissing, Mystery, Romance, Slow Build, also has sassy tags, contains science fiction!, emotional honesty, has show-like features, some angst but more fluff, this story has science fiction cos you know its doctor who which is a science fiction show, true feelings, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-20 01:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9470021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinite_regress/pseuds/infinite_regress
Summary: Clara and the Doctor prepare to go out for dinner. That's the first mystery of the day because neither of them actually planned it. When the TARDIS gets caught up in a wave of chrono-energy they have to survive emotional upheaval as well as dangerous uninvited guests before they can figure out who or what is interfering in their personal lives.“This is amazing,” Clara said, looking at the glittering star-scape above. “It’s breathtaking!”He nodded. “Yes it is,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at the stars. He’d seen the universe born in fire and watched galaxies freeze as time ran out. The stars were nothing compared to her.





	1. An Unexpected Invitation

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my lovely beta readers Turn_of_the_sonic_screw, avespika and DaisyofGalaxy.

They should have done this years ago, the Doctor thought, booked a table in a nice little restaurant and sat down to eat together. Why did they spend their time running, hiding and verbally sparing, when he could just sit still and get lost in the way her eyes crinkled at the edges when she smiled? 

Deep down, squirreled away in some dusty nook in his brain, he knew very well why they never stopped running and dashing breathlessly from one adventure to the next. If they stopped running they would start  _ feeling _ . Feeling was scary and complicated, and lead to things that would burn him in the end. 

But, she’d asked him, quite specifically, to take her out to dinner. She’d left him a note on the TARDIS console, even told him the restaurant and the date, February 14 th , though why that should matter he had no idea. 

“Are you ready?” he said, not looking up from the console.

“For what?”

He looked up then, and she stood in her green coat and black trousers, with sensible shoes, in front of the bookcase, carefully turning the first edition  _ Jane Eyre _ in her hands. She did not open it, but rather she held it reverently, stroking the leather as if it contained secrets she was loathe to delve into. He wondered, idly, why she did that. She knew the story, after all. Why not open the book?

He pulled at his cuffs, snapping them each in turn. Irritation gnawed at him. He had put on his best suit while she was not prepared at all. Perhaps he’d misunderstood. But her note was direct and to the point.

“Dinner,” he said gruffly. Then he waved his hand up and down his black-suited body.

“Oh,” she said, glancing up, and then, “ _ Oh.”  _ She stared at him, as if noticing for the first time he’d scrubbed up. “I’ll go and change then.” She eased  _ Jane _ back into the space between  _ Advanced Temporal Mechanics _ and  _ The History of Everything _ and then fluttered her way towards him. She paused in front of him, brushed some imaginary lint from his lapel, and said lightly, “I’ll just go and have a wash.” 

He stood, slightly baffled, as she darted away and left him wondering, as he always wondered, just what he was supposed to make of  _ that _ . And since wondering gave him a headache these days, and he knew very well  _ having a wash _ could take quite some time, he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves,  and pulled open the inspection hatch to the temporal stabilisers beneath the TARDIS console.

#

Clara trotted off to her room. Well, this was new, the Doctor, in an undeniably dashing black suit, loitering and muttering ‘dinner’. She couldn’t help wonder what brought  _ that _ on. Still, she’d be a fool not to take dinner when offered. In fact, it was high time they paused and talked. She’d been noticing things. Looks, glances, a flutter in her chest when his stormy blue-grey eyes met hers. Counting the days until Wednesday. Turning invitations down flat because he  _ might _ turn up and it would be just as well to stay home. In case, you know, a planet needed saving or anything. 

She raised an eyebrow when she opened the door to her room and saw a red dress hung on the outside of her wardrobe. She ran her hand over the fabric’s cool sheen. A bold choice. Someone was trying to tell her something. Who would do that, though? The TARDIS was a trickster some days, but this? She could hardly imagine it was the Doctor, but he had sprung this on her and sent her scurrying off to dress up.  

She frowned, somewhat flummoxed. Still, a dress like that warranted a shower, blow dry and freshly shaved legs. The Lord of Time could wait and so could their table. They had a time machine, after all. 

#

The Doctor decoupled the co-regulation capacitor from the dimensional shift circuitry, and scratched his head. The amount of residual energy in the system was increasing, when the p-wave should be flattening.  He popped his head level with the console and flicked on an external monitor. 

“Strange,” he muttered. Then he frowned as a complex wave-front built on the monitor. 

“No, no, I’m not in the mood for temporal anomalies,” he complained, and then scrambled back under the console to recouple the circuits he’d just severed before the wave-front hit the TARDIS. He groaned aloud, and realised he would never reconnect the systems in time. “I’m dressed for dinner,” he said plaintively. “And Clara’s probably. . .” Clara! 

The leading wave slammed into the TARDIS. The first shock knocked the Doctor to the floor, and then in a series of sickening jolts sent him tumbling across the console room. 

He groaned, sat up and tentatively brought his fingers up to his forehead. Blood congealed just above his eyebrow and a thousand cannon balls pounded inside his head. 

“This is not good. Very, very not good,” he muttered. A wave-packet of chrono-energy this dense, let loose inside the TARDIS? Anything could happen. “No good lying down on the job, Doctor,” he remonstrated with himself. He had to get to his feet and find Clara. 

Even as he said those words he felt time swell and buckle around him. He watched in fascinated horror as the schism leached through the TARDIS walls and vaporous trails of blue light sought out her secret places. They infused the TARDIS console, and the Cloister Bell tolled as the energy spread like a virus through her systems.

“No you don’t!“ he yelled, but the mist twisted out from the open panel where he’d been working and curled towards him. 

Time contracted and stopped. The dust in the air froze, suspended in silver specks, and the hum of the TARDIS engines fell silent. The blue lights surrounded him, swirling tendrils of raw chrono-energy, probing and dancing above his face, swooping around his body, and then diving again towards his nose. 

He turned his face and tried to scramble away, but creeping vines of blue light twirled up his arms binding him tight. 

The blue light above him split into a million strands and plunged towards his face.  The world exploded into a bright purple light, before fading to blackness. 

#

Clara stepped from the shower and wrapped a towel around her head. The shower on the TARDIS was much better than the one in her flat. No water meter for one thing, and an impressive stock of shower products, presumably brought by others occupying these rooms before her.  _ Perhaps _ the Doctor picked up bergamot bliss shower gel, although she couldn’t imagine it. Did he do ordinary things like shower and shave? She tried to remember if she’d ever noticed a five o’clock shadow on him, but she wasn’t sure. 

She’d laid the red dress out on the single bed and now she pondered again how it got there. If it was a hint, it was a pretty blunt one. When a man chose a dress like this for a woman it usually signalled at least some interested in the body beneath it. But this was the Doctor. Then again, the way they been looking at each other over recent months. . . If it was anyone else, she’d call what they did flirting. But, with the Doctor? Sometimes it felt totally like flirting, yet others it was more of a disorientating dance that left her head spinning and her heart pounding, but ultimately lacked a crescendo. 

She shook the doubts off as she shimmied into the dress. Standing in front of the mirror, she smoothed the lines of the soft fabric. Long, tasteful, yet tucked in the right places. 

Without warning, a deafening roar and a shuddering jolt crashed through the TARDIS. The bottles of cologne on her dresser rattled and shook, and the chair tumbled over. She stumbled, propelled towards the bed, and then a crazy lurch thrust her in the opposite direction, lifting her feet from the floor and sending her flying into the wall. She gasped, air knocked from her lungs, and slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor.

The cloister bell boomed, reverberating through her chest and pounding her head, until the racket forced her to her feet. She flung her hands over her ears and ran barefoot into the corridor. 

She skidded to a halt. There, right in front of her, all tweedy jacket and no eyebrows, the Doctor stood, scratching his face.  Her heart jumped. It was him, her young Doctor, the voice she’d heard calling her from Trenzalore on the day her heart broke. 

He took a faltering step towards her, paused, and then took a deep breath and marched right past her and up to her bedroom door. She stepped towards him, about to cry out his name, but he looked right through her.

She watched, open-mouthed, as he raised his fist to rap on the door, and then let his hand fall to his side. He rubbed his chin. Then he whispered, “Clara, my Clara,” before he shook his head and turned away. 

She found her voice and called his name. “Doctor? I’m right here!” her heart rattled in her chest.

He mumbled as he passed her, looking with unseeing eyes, as oblivious, it seemed to her as he was to the tolling bell. “Bad idea, Doctor,” he said, wringing his hands. 

Clara choked. “You can’t see me, can you?”  A heavy weight closed around her heart, and she clutched her chest for a moment. “I’m standing right in front of you, and you can’t see me,” she said as he strode down the corridor. “Why, why didn’t you knock?”  Frustration spilled over and she ran to him, but he vanished, and all she could hear was that damn bell, and a hollow voice at the back of her mind.  _ I’m right here, and you can’t see me. _

A gasp escaped her lips. Of course she’d wondered what it felt like for him when she pushed him clumsily away after Trenzalore. But, this hollow ache she felt now slammed it home.  _ This _ is how much it hurts when someone you love doesn’t see you. Her eyes glistened.  _ And I do love him. _

Too much hung unsaid between them. There was no point running away from it any more, they needed, more than anything, to sit down and talk. But, before they could do that, she had to find him.     

The Cloister bell’s relentless boom drove her towards the console room. The metal corridors, cold underfoot, had never seemed so long. He’d told her once the bell tolled when he faced mortal danger, and if she ever heard it she should not worry about him, and keep herself safe. Well, to hell with that. She’d wasted enough time playing safe. 

#

Clara hitched up the long red dress and tore towards the console room. The cold metal floors made no sound under her bare feet, but the pounding of her heart in her ears seemed almost, but not quite, enough to drown out that damn bell. 

The console room felt wrong the moment she passed the threshold. Eerily still, the only movement an ethereal blue glow that hung in puffs of low cloud about the floor. The high central column and the console, usually buzzing and humming, was frozen. 

“Doctor?” fighting down panic, she called his name in a low whisper.

Silence.

She climbed down the steps towards the central dais, and then saw him prone on the floor. Blood pooled on the floor by his head. 

“No, no, no,” she muttered. The Doctor lying injured on the floor of his time ship? Definitely not in tonight’s game plan. She fought back the instinct to rush to him, and instead took stock as she approached. Tendrils of blue light reached out from under the console to grasp and curl around him. They spiralled up his arms, and flicked and spat around his legs. 

Careful not to touch the blue light, she knelt beside him. The gash on his forehead trickled blood, and his eyes darted beneath his eyelids as if he had fallen into some wild REM sleep. 

“What do I do?” She touched his face, hoping he’d stir. “Doctor. Tell me what to do.” 

Her heart sank as she felt his skin, pallid, grey and stone cold. He did not move.

“Come back to me!” she demanded, shaking his shoulder in frustration. He could not leave her now!  _ At least there’s no sign he’s regenerating _ . That was a comfort, and she used that thought to hold on to her poise. She couldn’t just sit here; she had to do something. Get him away from this snare and treat his injury.

“Okay, what would you do?” Of course! She carefully lifted his jacket, avoiding the blue tendrils of light, and felt inside. Her hand closed around the sonic glasses. She grabbed them triumphantly. 

Okay, point and think. She directed her gaze along the crackling ropes that entwined him, and followed them back to the panel under the console. 

_ LET HIM GO! _

She projected the command at the mysterious force. The tendrils of energy flickered and crackled, loosened, and then wound around him again, tighter than ever.

She focused her mind, pouring all the passion she’d kept under wraps for so long into the thought.  _ YOU CAN NOT HAVE HIM!  _

The energy ropes that bound him jerked and fizzed, and the umbilical cord between him and the TARDIS severed and snapped back inside the hatch.

His eyes flicked open.

“Clara,” he said, his voice a gravelly rasp that sent a thrill running through her. She peered at him over the sonic glasses. 

“Hello,” she breathed.

The twines of light probed outwards again. 

She tugged his shirt. “We need to go. Can you move?” 

Free of the blue chains, he leapt to his feet. “Come on!” He grabbed her hand and fairly propelled her out of the console room and didn’t stop the headlong dash until they were deep within the TARDIS. Finally, gasping for breath she pulled him to a halt.

“What  _ was _ that?”

“I’m not sure, although I have a suspicion.”

She raised an eyebrow. She noticed the Cloister Bell was no longer ringing, but she couldn’t say when it had stopped. 

The Doctor went on, “Something that’s not supposed to exist.” He tugged her hand. “We need to get to the library.”

Not so fast. She had more questions, so her feet remained rooted to the spot. “Doctor. I saw you. The other you, when you were, well, before you are now. You were about to knock on my door.”

“I was?” 

“You couldn’t see me.”

“Interesting. Although not, I’m afraid to say a particularly good sign. It means something’s manipulating the temporal energy in the TARDIS.”

“Do you remember almost knocking on my door and then changing your mind?”

The Doctor flushed. No doubt about it, his face flushed properly red and he looked away.

“What did you want?” she persisted, not prepared to let it drop.

“Could have been any number of things.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Perhaps you’d left something in the oven. Or a pair of your socks in the sauna. Don’t think i haven’t noticed.”

“You’re changing the subject. And  _ I _ don’t wear socks in the sauna.”

“Perhaps that was me, then.” He sighed. “Honestly Clara, it could have been any number of occasions.” He strode off down the corridor without answering any further.

Clara paused and watched his back for a moment as he stomped away. How many times had he almost knocked on her door? They  _ really _ needed to sit down and talk. 

Without warning, a howling wind blasted along the passage, almost knocking her sideways. She expected to slam into a wall, but suddenly the walls were gone and empty space stretched before her. 

A vortex swirled under her feet, icy cold, as the winds buffeted her. “Doctor!” she screamed. A sickening rush in her stomach matched the pulsing in her head. Blue lights from the vortex below snaked up towards her. She tottered at the edge of the precipice.

Then, his long arms looped around her waist like an anchor.

She grasped his jacket, bunching the fabric in her fist as her heart pounded in her chest.

“I’ve got you, Clara,” he said. His voice soft in her ear. He pulled her body close to his, and then edged backwards, away from the screaming abyss. “Don’t look down. Look at me,” he said, locking his stormy eyes onto hers. She didn’t know if it was the intensity of his gaze, or almost falling into a screaming abyss, but her heart jumped and raced.

“I won’t let you go,” he whispered. They stood together, the red dress billowing in the wind, and for a burning moment she wanted nothing more than to stay in his arms forever. But the icy blast biting at her bare feet forced her back to reality.

“We need to go,” she breathed. 

He nodded, as if that thought had occurred to him too, but something equally powerful rooted him to the spot. 

A crash and judder all around them jolted them both to their senses. He laced his fingers through hers, and they ran.

 


	2. Love is a Promise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Clara have to deal with the emotional fall out from two unexpected guests.

Clara and the Doctor burst into the library. He started unloading tomes from a shelf at a startling rate, piling up leather bound books and acres of paperbacks around the floor and on the round tables. 

“Do we have to look through all of these?” Clara said, her heart sinking. That would take forever. 

“What? No, I need to move this shelf. There’s an off-piste passage here, not registered in the TARDIS central data banks.”

“Okay, I’ll bite, why do we need that?” 

“To get to the secondary temporal inverter,” he said, in that way of his, as if that explained everything perfectly when what he said actually explained nothing at all.

She sighed. Sometimes teasing an explanation that made any kind of sense out of him was worse than getting her year 8’s to explain what a PokéStop was. “And why,” she said with forced patience, “do we need to get there?” 

“So we can decouple the rogue temporal wave-packet from the TARDIS systems.” She sighed again, and decided it was probably better just to help him shift the bookcase and hope that things became clearer. 

#

The Doctor paused as he piled another book on the table. His face stiffened and his eyes darted to the corner of the room.

“Are you okay?” Clara said. She reached to his forehead, where a smear of blood hid a nasty gash. “You should let me treat that.” 

“It’s nothing,” he said, but his eyes told a different story. He stared into the corner of the room, his eyes wide, and then he blinked rapidly and shook his head.

Clara stared too. A brown haired young woman strode across the library. 

He gasped, staggered backwards slightly, as if a physical shock had jerked right through him.

The girl laughed, “Really,” she said over her shoulder. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” 

“Who is she?” Clara whispered. 

He shook his head. “An apparition,” he murmured. “Designed to poke me where it hurts.”

The girl was pretty, and young, and a pang of jealousy--that she tried to repress-- pricked her. She knew there had been others before her, and didn’t doubt there would be more to follow her. But, he looked at this young woman with such tenderness in his eyes that she couldn’t help herself.  “Was she. . . Did you travel together?”

“For a time,” he murmured. 

She had never seen him look so  _ sad _ . He took a step towards the woman, and then turned his face away. 

“Susan,” he whispered. “Her name was Susan, and she. . .”

Clara reached for his hand to comfort him, but he pulled away.

“I always meant to go back,” he said, with a tortured look in his eyes. “But if I did that, then whatever life she led would become a fixed point, unchangeable.” His shoulders slumped. “I’m too scared. So I leave her free in my memory, like this. Young and happy.” 

“You must care for her a great deal.” Clara looked away, trying hard to conceal the hurt that he would not share his pain with her. 

“Clara, don’t you see? My life is this restless dash across the universe, and if I ever stop, have to face this . . . emptiness.” Red eyed, he tracked the girl across the room. “People leave, even my own kind.”

“She was a Time Lady?”

The girl he called Susan walked up to the bookshelf, halted in front of them, but her eyes went right through them both. “Grandfather!” she exclaimed. She was calling another man, long, long ago. She turned and vanished as quickly as she came. 

Clara heard him sigh. Clara knew him so well now. He could be terribly grumpy or infuriatingly clever, but sometimes, when he thought he was alone, she would catch a glimpse of that haunted look. 

“I’m not just a  _ guy _ , Clara. I’m a Time Lord. Do you understand what that means?  Susan was my granddaughter. We fled Gallifrey more than 2000 years ago, and when she left me, well, that was just the start of people leaving. I told you I was sick of losing people,” he said quietly. “And I really am.”

Clara didn’t know what to say. The sadness in his eyes sent a pang of real pain through her. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she’d stay with him forever, never leave him, but she held that back. She knew that wouldn’t be true. She could spend the rest of her life with him, but he couldn’t spend the rest of his with her.  Suddenly his cool distance after he’d regenerated made a whole lot more sense. When they first met he’d thought he was living his last lifetime. Maybe he flirted with crossing that line he set for himself and falling in love, because he thought he was almost done. Then he’d been given a whole batch of new lives--and the burden that comes with them. She hadn’t even realised what that meant at the time, but she had no doubts now.  

His words echoed in her ears.  _ “Immortality isn’t living for ever, that’s not what it feels like. It’s everyone else dying.” _

“Doctor,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

“I promised her I’d return, one day. What does that make me?” he said.

He looked so vulnerable, like the day they had sat on the TARDIS step and he asked her if he was a good man. She had been wrapped in her own loss, tangled with the grief of losing her best friend and adjusting to the new man who appeared in his shoes. She often felt she had not been the friend to him she should have been that day. She wanted to put that right. To comfort him now. But still she had no words that would express how she felt. So instead, she stepped up on her tiptoes and brushed a light kiss to his cheek. 

She heard his breath catch as she kissed him, and felt his hands on her waist again. For a moment he held her captive in his arms, and locked those steel eyes with hers. She forgot to breathe. Forgot everything as he put his hand gently to her face. 

Then the TARDIS juddered and books fell from the shelves, scattering across the library floor. A tendril of blue light wove under the door and probed the room. It wound round a chair leg, leaching the wood of colour, and then the leg splintered with a loud crack. The tendril freed itself and moved on.

“Damn it,” he said. “Help me shift this!” they shoved the bookcase aside and squeezed through the gap. As they drew it closed behind them Clara saw more blue vines snaking across the floor.

He tugged her hand and hissed, “Come on!” 

“What are those things?” 

“I don’t know. But they got on board when we were hit by a wave-packet of chrono-energy, just when I had decided coupled the co-genera--” he must have caught her skeptical look, for he changed tack. “When I was doing some repairs.”

“Why were you fiddling with the TARDIS when we were supposed to be going out?”

“If you’d been ready I wouldn’t have needed to occupy myself, would I?”

“Well you did spring it on me!”

They settled to a walk along the darkened corridors as the crashing in the library faded.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It was your idea!” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

He sighed. “Look, I don’t mind going out for dinner, honestly Clara, it’s a nice idea.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why do you think it was  _ my _ idea?”

“Well it was hard to miss your fluorescent yellow note stuck to the console.”

“I didn’t leave a note,” Clara said.

He pulled a note from his pocket and thrust it under her nose. “It was your handwriting. ‘Dinner, at the Belestramo de Calvier February 14 th ”

It  _ was _ her handwriting. Although she’d never heard of the Belestramo de Calvier. She could only speculate why she’d choose that particular date. “Oh. Nice restaurant is it?” she said, rather feebly, as she couldn’t think of anything else to say that made sense.

“I had to go back four years to get a reservation on that date. So I suppose it must be. What’s so special about February 14 th , anyway?”

Clara coughed and blushed. Apparently she had invited/requested/demanded dinner on Valentine's day. Not too hard to read the subtext there. He looked at her expectantly and she realised she hadn’t answered his question. She had no idea  _ how  _ to answer it. 

She decided to change the subject and regain what dignity she could. “It was nice of you to pick this dress for me.”

Now he spluttered. “I don’t pick clothes. Especially not . . .”

“Not, what?” 

He tried to look away, but there really were not many other places he  _ could _ look in the narrow corridor. 

“I well, I’m sure that’s a very fine dress, but . . .”

“But what?” he’d noticed the dress. She’d  _ noticed _ him noticing when he caught her earlier. 

“I think you look just fine in whatever you’re wearing,” he said, sidestepping the question rather effectively. 

“Well if that’s true why did you tell me to change?” Clara shot back. 

“I don’t know!” he said, irritably. “I expect they have a dress code at these places.” 

Clara felt deflated. She shouldn’t care about such things, she knew that, but sometimes he made her feel like furniture. No, that really wasn’t fair and it wasn’t even true. Sometimes she caught him looking at her as if she was the most precious thing in the universe. Mainly when he thought she wasn’t watching, of course. And sometimes their eyes met and it sent a shockwave through her. It would be nice to know what he made of those moments, but judging by his current levels of candour, he was unlikely to share that information anytime soon. She longed to ask him, ‘What am I to you?’ A Friend?  Someone to pal around with? Or something more? 

But, the right moment never seemed to come. If they were not running or hiding they were verbally sparring, and when they had a quiet moment, or she got into a serious mood, suddenly  _ he  _ would get prickly and evasive. 

“If you didn’t pick it out, then who did? It wasn’t hung outside my wardrobe when I left this morning,” she said, and even she could hear the sulky tone to her voice.

The Doctor frowned for a moment, and his gaze lingered over the dress, almost reluctantly at first. Then he traced the v of the front up her neck and met her eyes.

“I suppose,  _ if _ I was going to choose a dress for you to wear,” he said softly, as if sharing a delicious secret, “then I could have done worse.” 

She gasped slightly, but before she could speak he’d backed away. 

“You know,” he said quickly, “I think my mistake was completely decoupling the co-regulation circuit. If I’d left it patched into the quantum stabilisers I don’t think whatever this is could have used the wave-packet to get aboard.” 

“Great.” Clara snapped, smarting at his emotional u-turn. “So you did something stupid.”

“I’m always doing something stupid, keep up.” 

“Well that’s true,” she grumbled.

They reached the end of the dark corridor and entered a giant vault, with high ceilings and plated with metal sheets that echoed every sound. 

“Where are we?” 

“A storage room.”

“Storing what?” Stacks of crates with circular markings-- she took those to be Gallifreyan-- piled high against the walls. She coughed as clouds of dust flew up from the tops of nearby boxes. 

“Spares,” the Doctor said simply. He opened a box and started to rifle through, every now and again handing some odd bit of tech to her. In short order her arms were stacked with a circuit board and several organic-looking capacitors and a small box of what might have been microchips.

“You don’t come down here very often then?” she muttered, as more clouds of dust rose to choke her.

The Doctor had his whole head inside one of the crates when Clara heard a deep metallic clang. Boots, marching on the metal floor, reverberating through her sent a chill down her spine. She nudged the Doctor, and whispered, “Are you sure whatever it is can’t see us?”  She swallowed hard as a Cyberman stomped around the corner.

“Yes. Well, I think so. This is probably the result of temporal displacement. None of the apparitions should be able to interact with us in this relativistic frame of reference,” he said cheerfully. 

Clara’s heart raced. The Cyberman, whether it could see them or not, was still terrifying. She yanked the Doctor out of sight between the rows of boxes.

“Really Clara, there’s no need to worry,” he said.

She pressed a finger up to his lips, and then pointed around the corner at the Cyberman’s footprints, left behind in a patch of dust.  

“Ah,” he said. “I hate being wrong.” He started to take the items from Clara’s arms and stuff them in his unfeasibly large pockets. 

The Cyberman paused, and then turned in their direction. 

“How did that get in?” Clara hissed.

“I’m not sure. It was a very long time ago. . .”

He looked up and the colour drained from his face. “It was a bad day. Someone I cared about died.”  His eyes seemed immeasurably old to her then. “The people I travel with. They grow old. They leave me and live lives of their own, and most of the time they remember me with affection, I hope. But sometimes-- not often, but sometimes . . . they die.” 

She opened her mouth, and then closed it again.

He looked at her then, and put his hand to her face. “Not you, Clara Oswald. Never you. I promise won’t let anything happen to you.” 

She looked up at him, and saw the eyes of a man who would not stop. She realised he was making her a promise; he would never stop trying to save her. She wondered that the Cyberman couldn’t hear her heart pounding. 

The Time Lord was so close her then she almost forgot to breathe. “Doctor,” she whispered. 

The Cyberman paused, and then its steel boots echoed again as it came closer. 

The Doctor pulled her further along the boxes and towards a gap between the boxes and the wall. As she passed gaps in the stacks of boxes she saw flashes of silver. They reached the wall and followed the passage along towards the distant door. Her heart raced. The last time she’d seen one of those metal monsters she’d been standing in a graveyard, holding Danny in her arms. That day flooded back, and she almost reeled.

_ Love isn’t an emotion. It’s a promise.  _

The Doctor grabbed her around the waist to steady her as she wobbled.  “Clara?” His eyes radiated concern. 

“I can feel it. Like that day in the graveyard,” she whispered. 

“I know. I had a vivid flashback too,” he said, looking down at her.

She placed her hand flat on his chest, to feel the reassuring rise and fall of his breath, and to remind herself he was here, her flesh and blood Doctor, not a phantom made of steel. 

“What did you mean?” she whispered. “I always wondered what you meant when you asked me if I thought you cared for me so little betraying you would make a difference.” She’d had months to ponder that after he’d gone, and wonder if he had been trying to tell her something more. 

“What? It meant that I forgave you,” he said.

“Is that all?” she said. The way he looked at her sometimes made her think there was much more behind those words. But she’d never found the right time, or enough courage, to ask him. 

Now, she examined his eyes as he wrestled with his reply. His hand felt hot on her waist through the dress's thin fabric.

“You’d just lost someone you loved and you were in pain. You did a wrong thing, but I forgave you. What more could there be?” 

Clara sighed. What more indeed? She’d slipped into madness that day. Danny gone, and a guilt so powerful she couldn’t breathe gnawed at her heart. Because when he died, there was the smallest, traitorous part of her that felt relieved she would not have to live the lie she’d wedged herself into. The life she tried desperately hard to convince herself she wanted. The feeling had flashed by in a moment, but she couldn’t forgive herself for it. That as much as anything drove her over the edge into casting those keys into the volcano. And then she lost them both.

The Cyberman paced a circuit around the store room.

The Doctor tugged her hand. “We need to go.” 

She couldn’t make her feet move.  _ “You’d _ come back to me, wouldn’t you?” she asked. Ridiculous, infuriating tears pricked her eyes, but she had to know: would the Doctor choose her? Or like Danny, would he let her go out of a sense of duty or penance?”

“Clara,” his voice was low and urgent. “I will always choose you. I will always come back for you. That’s a promise.”  


	3. Gatecrasher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor has to deal with deadly uninvited guests aboard the TARDIS. He's less sure how to deal with a confusing new development in his relationship with Clara.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Previously: the Doctor and Clara were trapped in a storage hold with a Cyberman.

The gap they had been running through narrowed. Clara squeezed through, past a boxes balanced precariously high. 

“Be careful,” he hissed, but it was too late. The pile of crates toppled towards them, scattering electronics across the floor and trapping her leg. 

The  _ thud _ ,  _ thud _ ,  _ thud _ , of the boots stopped. Somehow, the silence was even more unnerving than the hollow noise had been.

Clara desperately shoved the boxes aside, scrabbling to help the Doctor free them both before the Cyberman closed in. 

She yelped as an energy bolt cracked past her head. In a scramble of limbs and electronics, somehow they were both on their feet, running and dodging between beams of scorching energy. 

They made it to the door. “Come on, come on, open up!” The Doctor slapped the door with his palm.

“Why won’t it open?” Clara asked. 

“Whatever got in is compromising the TARDIS systems. Override,” he snapped, glaring at the door panel through the sonic glasses. 

The Cyberman fired again. There was nowhere to hide now. The bolt ricochet off the walls. Close, too close.

After an eternity of waiting the door hissed open. They tumbled through, and the Doctor sonicked the door control to seal the room.  

“That should hold our friend up.”

A crash against the door — a metal fist on metal — sent Clara careering backwards. They turned and ran, until they were far away from the noise.

Panting, footsore, Clara had to stop running. She grabbed his arm. “Stop,” she said. She rested her arms on her legs, almost bent double. “What the hell is going on?” 

“I think whatever this is, is pulling things, people, monsters, out of the TARDIS timeliness. It seems to be choosing ones that will disturb us. That Cyberman got into the TARDIS the day I watched a young man who travelled with me die.”

“I’m sorry,” Clara said. “What was his name?”

“Adric,” he said. Then he shook his head. “It’s getting stronger, and more able to interact with us.”

“Great,” she said. It was hard enough to avoid being blasted to death, never mind a side order of emotional upheaval; she felt raw enough. “How do we stop it?”  

“For one thing we need to stay sharp and not let it play mind games with us.” He grew thoughtful. “We should stop by the astro-physics observatory, and find the wave-packet’s point of origin. Perhaps then I can figure out what it is, and how to stop it.” 

“What about getting to the secondary blah blah?”

He suppressed a smile. “You do have a way with words. We’ll go to the secondary  _ blah blah  _ after. He looked down at her feet, and concern — or consternation — wrinkled his features. “Why don’t you have shoes on?”

Clara rolled her eyes, and thought,  _ he notices this now _ ? “I was just out of the shower. Frankly, you’re lucky I wasn’t still in my underwear.” 

His eyes widened at that, and she couldn’t tell if it was relief or something else flashing there before he looked away, red-faced.

“That came out wrong,” she added quickly.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, pointing to a trickle of blood running down her ankle. 

“Oh,” she said. She knew his head wasn’t in much better shape, with the open wound by his hairline. “Perhaps we should go via the med bay?” she suggested.    

“No time.” He shook his head, and pointed at the floor. “Sit down here a minute.”

He produced a wad of padding and bandages from his pocket as she leaned against the wall with her leg stretched out. 

“Can I look?” he said gently. She lifted up her dress up, and gasped a little when he saw the slash across her thigh, just above her knee. It began to throb harder when she saw just how bad it was. 

He pressed the pad on the wound. “Apply pressure,” he said, pressing her hand over the pad. 

She did as he asked, and he bound the wound tightly. “That should stop the bleeding,” he said, with his hand resting lightly on her other knee. “Those pads have medi-nanites in them.”

He had another pad in his hand. Instead of handing it to her to clean herself up, as she expected him to, he said in a gravelly voice, “You want me to, um, clean your leg up?”

She nodded, almost mesmerised by the feeling of his hand on her skin. She realised, with a lump in her throat, that she liked the feeling of his hand on her skin. She  _ wanted _ him to touch her.  

He wrapped his free hand around the back of her calf, and gently wiped the smeared blood away. When he glanced up his eyes trapped her in a dizzying flush; heat in her face, a tingle in her chest, and her breath coming in uncertain, shallow rasps. 

“Thank you,” she managed.

His smile seemed coy and shy, and he remained silently squatting by her side for a moment. 

“Got any more of that?” she asked. “You should let me take a look at your head.”

“This old head?” he said, “tougher than a Dalek’s top-knot.”

“So you say.” She and held her hand out firmly.

He sighed theatrically, but pulled another clean nano-pad from his pocket and handed it over.

“Sit,” she commanded. 

He complied, and she found a position to squat in that didn’t hurt too much. She turned his face gently away from her so she could see the cut at his hairline.

“That’s quite deep,” she said. It looked like it might need stitches. At least, when  Aarav Kapoor in year 8 managed to gash his head slipping off stage during the final dress rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he’d needed stitches. Of course, this was the Doctor, so the normal rules didn’t apply. 

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m not as break—”

“I know, you’re not as breakable as me, but will you just let me take care of you?” she snapped, a little sharper than she meant to. 

“Yes ma’am,” he said. 

She looked at him then, and felt a fit of giggles threatening to burst to the surface. He really brought the teacher out in her, some days. He was quite obviously suppressing a laugh too, and once she started, he joined in. 

They both laughed hard, until she put her hand on his chest and said, “We’re a right pair, aren’t we?” 

“We probably deserve each other,” he said. Then he became serious. His eyes roved around her face, as if trying to unlock some hidden secret.

She dipped forwards until her forehead rested against his. “I think we do,” she said. She wondered what lay beneath those ancient, blue-grey eyes. What was he feeling right now? Would he even tell her if she asked him?

“Are you okay?” she whispered. He must be feeling churned up after everything they saw.

“I’m okay,” he said, softly. “I’m always okay.”

“It must have been hard, though, seeing your granddaughter like that.”

He brought his long fingers gently to her face, and whispered her name, reverently, almost as if it was a prayer. “Clara,” for a heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to kiss her.

A whirring, grinding, rattling metal on metal smashed the silence between them, ripping the tender moment apart. 

Clara’s heart sank, adrenaline surged through her veins, and the Doctor leapt to his feet. The most hated battle cry in the universe echoed down the TARDIS corridor.

“No, no, how did one of those get in?” she said, fear pulsing through her in waves.  

The Doctor looked ashen, and as he grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet he said, “At the parting of the ways. The day I kissed Rose, and then I died.”

Clara barely had time to think. “You’re full of surprises, you are,” she said, but then her full attention turned to running. The clang and grind on the floor motored on, and the terrifying shriek drowned out his answer.

“EX-TERM-IN-ATE!     EX-TERM-IN-ATE!”

They ran. They ran as fast as they ever had, dodging the Dalek’s deadly fire, hand in hand through the TARDIS corridors. Her leg throbbed and her head spun. No matter what dangers lurked outside, she’d always felt safe in the TARDIS. In here she  _ should _ be safe.  And something else pricked the back of her mind. Who was Rose? 

Another energy beam cracked past. The Doctor urged her forwards each time she flagged. They pushed on, breathlessly running down corridors, twisting away from its terrible weapons time and time again. Her bare feet were soon raw. Would it never stop?   

Eventually, the Doctor paused by a doorway. “I’ve had enough of this gatecrasher,” he said. He pushed open the door. “I’ve been saving this as a surprise for you.” 

A swimming pool lay beyond the door, with its dark waters gleaming and gently rippling in the low light. 

“I thought it got ejected, years ago.” 

“It did. But since you’ve been spending more time on the TARDIS, I thought you might like it.” 

She smiled at that. She wouldn’t have taken him for a swimmer. He hurried through the door, left it wide open, and stood to the right, pressed against the wall. He motioned her to do the same on the other side. A smile crept over her face as she began to understand his plan. 

Soon, the sound of the Dalek’s repetitive, hysterical hate-filled message resounded through the room. 

“EX-TERM-IN-ATE!”

The eyestalk penetrated the room first, followed by its gun. 

He leapt on the Dalek and grabbed the gun to hold it firm. With her heart racing in an odd mix of fear and excitement, Clara followed the Doctor’s lead. They both shoved the Dalek as hard as they could towards the pool.

“EX-TERM-IN-ATE, EX-TERM-IN-ATE!” the creature squawked.

“Good luck with that,” the Doctor said, and with a final shove, they thrust it into the pool. The Doctor turned his sonic glasses on the water and the pool began to crackle and fizz, as the Dalek’s fire turned back on itself.  

They ran from the room. Clara’s heart still pounded, but a satisfied glow settled in her chest. As they walked, and the Dalek’s shrieks receded, she put her hand on his arm.

“It was a nice thought, putting the pool back for me. Thank you.”

His face twitched into a lopsided grin. “Better wait until I clear out the trash before you take a dip, though.” 

“I will.” She paused for a moment before she went on. “Will you swim with me?” 

“One monster in the pool not enough for you?” 

She laughed, “Oh Doctor, you are no monster.”

“You haven’t seen my legs.” 

It was strange, how he thought so little of himself in that regard, when to her he was the sun, the moon, and the stars all wrapped up in one beautiful, mysterious package. “I’ll be the judge of that,” she quipped. Then she reached up on her tiptoes and pecked his cheek. 

He looked slightly stunned at the development. “Hugs, holding hands. Kisses,” he said, obviously flustered. “It’s a bit confusing. Do we kiss now? What are the rules for this? Is it just you kissing me? And, just so I’m clear, is it just cheeks or other places too?”

“You are kidding me, right?” she said. 

He looked at her with a blank expression. “Perhaps you should make some more of those cards, so I don’t muck it up?” he said, and then he paced off with his hands shoved in his pockets.  

Clara glared at his back. Sometimes, he really was an alien. 


	4. The Necessity of a Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Clara go to the astrophysics observatory, where things get dangerous.

The Doctor paced off, as fast as he could, furious with himself. Clara just kissed his cheek, and he’d blathered on the most ridiculous twaddle because her lips on his face made his head whirl and his hearts thunder.

“Astro-physics,” he said, and opened the door. “We need to track the coordinates of the wave-packet’s origin.” He stepped swiftly across the wide open floor space to the control panel at the back of the room. Once there, he activated a programme that would back track the signal and download the source information into a portable data drive.

He loved the calming ambience of this room. He didn’t come here all that often, but when he did, he would spend hours staring at the panoramic starscape. A billion pinpricks speckled the velvet sky, glimmering over head. He would lay in the centre of the floor and wonder at all those worlds around the billions of stars that he hadn’t seen yet, and perhaps never would, because even his impossibly long lifetime would  not be long enough to visit every one.  

One big bang kicked it all off --he’d seen it, something exploding from nothing. Then, as the universe cooled, some fragments of star stuff pulled together and settled into nebula, suns and planets, and on some of those planets, where the temperature was just right, and the ingredients all there, life became possible. 

The Doctor observed this, with his planet-sized intellect, and he noticed that where-ever life was possible, it was unstoppable. First one cell, then many; complexity followed and life exploded. Lifeforms would do what lifeforms always did; scurry about their daily business, eating, excreting and reproducing, and sometimes, those lifeforms would figure out how to do all those things  _ better.  _ They evolved and invented houses and shops, and chips and coffee, and telescopes and spaceships and their lives became about bigger things; family, love, and finding things out. They would stop to wonder about the stars and try to figure out the big questions, like how it all began and how it would all end. But, even those shining races that spent their days  _ wondering _ faced death and decay in the end. Ultimately, everything dispersed to where it all began; back to star stuff. 

Yes, he liked it here, for it reminded him that he was tiny--just an idiot passing through. Learning and making mistakes and helping out where he could.

Clara strode past him with a quick glance in his direction that he couldn’t decipher. “Wow,” she said, spinning around with her head back. “Wow!” 

She laughed, a proper laugh that sent a thrill through him. Her eyes, always enchanting, seemed to draw him closer. He watched as she twirled around under the stars, arms outstretched, head thrown back. A part of him wanted to twirl with her. He could  _ let _ himself take her hands and spin with her across the floor. He took a step forward. Then a crushing weight pulled him back. 

No, this was not for him.  _ She _ was not for him. Her warm skin, her smile, and those eyes! He would lose himself in them. No, it was better for him to watch her from a distance. Much less dangerous. If he took her in his arms and danced with her now how would he ever stop? 

She saw him watching though, and her smile broadened. She approached him shyly, biting her lower lip. She didn’t speak, but she gently took his hand. 

“This is amazing,” she said. “It’s breathtaking!”

He nodded. “Yes it is,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at the stars. He’d seen the universe born in fire and watched galaxies freeze as time ran out. The stars were nothing compared to her.  

“Dance with me?” she said, suddenly, and then apprehension filled her eyes, as if she was afraid of what she had said. Perhaps she was sorry it had slipped out.

“Clara, I can’t. . . I can’t dance with you,” he said, tortured by the thought of holding her and dancing. Too tempting. Not wise at all.

“Can’t, or won’t?” she said, with a crack in her voice. 

He knew that meant he’d hurt her and that in turn pricked his own hearts. “Does it matter?” he said, looking away, knowing that it would matter to her a great deal.

“Of course it matters,” she said, with hurt in her eyes.

He swallowed hard. How could he explain this? His desire, his fears, his reservations tangled into a knot in his chest. “Clara. I don’t think we  _ should _ .” He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. 

She looked him right in the eyes and her gaze trapped him. He could feel his face flush and his heart rate pick up.  _ This is why _ , he told himself,  _ because I cannot trust myself. _ One kiss and he would truly be lost to the rising passions in his hearts.

Now she turned away. She walked to the wall and sat down. He could see she wasn’t happy. Her brow creased in that way that just made her look prettier. He sighed very deeply and propped against the wall beside her

He opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again. Whatever he said would come out wrong and very likely complicate things. Was there anyone, anywhere in the universe worse at this than him? If such a person existed, he was yet to meet them. When he did, he’d raise a glass to the poor, inept fool.

“So,” she said, with her eyebrows arched, “You didn’t need prompt cards for kissing Rose.”

He groaned silently. How to explain  _ that _ ? He paused for a long time. Finally he said. “It was necessary.”

“Necessary? How can a kiss be necessary?” she scoffed and folded her arms.

“Rose, my friend, did something rash, to save me. The time vortex was burning her up. I removed the time vortex. With a kiss.” He mumbled the last part, rather quickly.

“Oh, I see. One of  _ those _ kisses.” Then she paused, staring intently at his face. “You said you died.”

“I regenerated. The vortex would have killed Rose. But you know I don’t die. I change. But, it’s still death. I lose myself, and have to start over again.”

Same man, new face. Same software, new case.

Clara sighed, as if she didn’t have the will or energy to stay mad at him for long. “You must have cared for her a great deal.”

“That’s just it, Clara, that’s the story of my whole life. I cared for Rose, loved her, even. And she slipped quite literally through my fingers into another universe. I can never see her again. I lose people.”

“I’m sorry,” and she did look sorry. She couldn’t stay annoyed at him these days any more than he could at her. 

After a while, she said. “Is it getting colder in here?”

“Perhaps.” He got up and checked the rate of progress on the download. “It’s still going.”

Clara started to shiver. 

“You want to wait outside? I’ll stay here and wait.”

“And get separated when the rooms go all Hogwarts? No thanks.”

Another ten minutes, and she was properly shivering. “Here,” he said, taking off his jacket.”

“What about you?” 

He just quirked an eyebrow. “My homeostatic system and temperature regulation is. . .”

“Better than mine?”

“More responsive.” He put his arm around her, and in spite of any lingering irritation, she snuggled up to him. 

He relaxed after a while, and enjoyed the feel of her small body close to his. That was the trouble, really. Once he relaxed about touch, he found himself wanting more.  _ Needing _ more. And that scared him, because he knew the impermanence and fragility of life better than anyone. He ought to move away. He ought to stay away, keep his distance just as he’d decided right at the start. He ought to do any number of things besides sit close to her and feel her tremble with cold and long to pull her close to warm her. But he did none of those things, instead, like a man in a dream, he took her hands in his, blew on them gently, and then rubbed them. 

She smiled up at him with her teeth chattering. “Is it done yet? It’s so cold here.”

He got up and checked the instruments, and made a satisfied click of his tongue. “About time,” he said. He took the data stick and put it in his pocket. “Let’s take the data and look at it somewhere else.” The temperature seemed to be dropping quicker than ever.

He helped the trembling Clara to her feet. “You okay?” 

“So cold,” she said. 

He hurried her to the door with his arm around her shoulder. It didn’t open. “Come on!”  He rapped on the opening pad, and then tried his sonic glasses. Still nothing. Clara stood trembling beside him. 

“Hang on,” he said, concern starting to tighten in his chest. A furious blast of icy air whipped through the room, as if the TARDIS had been ripped open and gorged on the icy vacuum of space. 

He scanned the door again. What was wrong here? It wasn’t a deadlock, but it  _ was _ something the TARDIS had done. Something was turning the TARDIS against him. 

He glanced at Clara. Her movements were stiff, and she seemed to have trouble focusing. She slumped back to the floor by the wall. 

“No you don’t, stay on your feet!” he said. Suddenly, time distorted around him, pushing back at his mind and then racing ahead. The air in the room shimmered. He looked desperately around for Clara. She’d vanished. 

“No, no, no,” he muttered. He scanned the area where she had been sitting through his glasses. She  _ was _ there, distorted by a temporal glitch. When he looked over the glasses she vanished.

He cursed, a hearty Gallifreyan curse. He ran back to the door and ripped the control panel open. The exposed circuits allowed him to connect with the TARDIS mainframe and look at the data he’d collected. He project a map of the temporal distortion on the inside of the sonic glasses.

The distortion emanated from two central points, the console room and a bedroom. The room Clara used, in fact. He frowned. Odd. But, he had to get her back before he spent time figuring that out. The temporal aura around her became deeper by the second. Her nose had turned blue and frost dusted her eyelids. Every moment he wasted she slipped further into a frozen future.  

The door circuits were a mess., If he rerouted the temporal regulator he should be able to generate a null field to draw her back into the correct time line. A fierce white light surrounded the component he needed to move. As he reached in, the circuit boards flashed red-hot. He yelped and yanked his hand out. A spray of silver sparks burst from the panel. He squinted hard at the glowing, tangled mass. “If you think a little pain is going to stop me, then you don’t know me very well at all,” he said.

He plunged his hand back into the cavity to grip the temporal regulator. Pain seared through his fingertips and devoured his whole arm. He wrapped his burning fingers around the regulator chip. It was a tiny, slippery capacitor-like component and it slid through his fingers as he tried to tease it out. He yanked his hand out and blew on his fingers for a second, before he thrust his arm back into the inspection hatch. Pain rocketed up his fingertips, spiralled around his arm and shot into his shoulder and stayed there, deeply pulsing. He forced down a scream, and focused on getting his fingers around the small chip. Sweat pooled under his burning arms, despite the cold.

A glorious agony consumed him.

“Give her back to me!” he said, as his fingers finally wrapped around the chip. He staggered backwards and sunk to the floor, letting the chip drop just in front of him. His hands trembled. The chip glowed gently, innocently, as if could not possibly be the cause of the piercing pain in his shoulder that now slowly seeped towards his chest.

He took long, deep breaths, deliberately, to work through the pain and gain control of his body again.   

Getting it out was the easy bit. Now, he had to integrate it with the temporal distributor, and get rid of the chrono-distortion in this room. He had to stick his hand back in that. Thoughts flashed through his head. The TARDIS was turning against him. What if he could never regain control?

He glanced through the sonic glasses, to see Clara, frosted white, shivering, right in front of him yet totally unreachable. Unless he put that chip where it needed to go.

“I will not lose Clara Oswald, not today, not like this,” he said, with an open wound in his chest. Adric, Rose, all those he couldn’t save, and those forever beyond his grasp, haunted him.

He picked up the chip in his hand. It tingled with temporal energy, and glowed like a firefly. He closed his fist carefully around it, and stood up. 

He could see where the chip needed to go, behind a tiny circuit board, in the middle of strands of optic wires that seemed to pulse in time with his hearts. 

“Clara,” he said.  _ That name keeps me fighting! _  “And, if you’re listening,” said, twirling his arms in the air, “It’s a very bad idea indeed to get to me by putting people I care about in harm’s way!”

He plunged his hand into an inferno of pain. He snatched a breath, made a low, grumbling in his chest, but held firm. Just a little to the left. Through the wires. He felt the chip click into place, and yanked his hand out. The temperature in the room reverted to normal.

He twirled around. No Clara. How far ahead in the future was she? 

He used the open panel to free the door mechanism, and then held his breath. Where was she? For a sinking moment, he saw nothing. Then her outline appeared, fuzzily at first and then coalescing into a solid form.

“Doctor” she said faintly, “Where did you go for so long?” 

“Clara,” he murmured, as he sunk to his knees beside her. How long had it been? He didn’t know, but it was clearly long enough for her to become hypothermic.

Her hands were frostbitten and deep blue, her eyelashes white. She was no longer shivering, and that meant nothing good. Her breaths were shallow, snatching in and then wheezing out.

A glassy stillness replaced the shivering, and her skin seemed entirely drained of colour. She had shrugged the jacket off, and mumbled barely coherently.

“I’m . . . burning.”

“No, you’re not. Paradoxical heating. That’s a symptom of hypothermia.”  

He put his fingers to her neck for a pulse, but he could barely feel it.

He needed to warm her, and fast. Could he rely on the TARDIS to let him get to the med bay? No, he couldn’t take that chance.

She whispered, “Are you there?”

“I’m right here,” he said. The stars glinted coldly overhead, impassive watchers of the  drama played out below. Her pulse was so slow and faint it seemed like an eternity between one heartbeat and the next. Her brown eyes were glass, looking somewhere past him. 

He leaned closer, his hearts breaking. He could not lose her. He would not lose Clara.  

He closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, and summoned regenerational energy from deep within his core. He had done this once before, for River, tricking the mitochondria in his cells into releasing a trace of regeneration energy.

He raised her chin with two fingers of his good hand. “I think you need a doctor,” he said, and pressed his lips gently to hers. 

Her lips were deathly cold. He breathed out, slowly, delicately into the kiss, channelling the golden glow gently inside her. He felt her lips warm, become soft again, and he laid two fingers on her cheek. A golden glow began in his fingertips and gradually replaced the white-blue tinge over her skin. A sigh escaped her lips. He pulled a fraction away.

Her eyes regained focus, and she looked around until she finally settled on his face.

“Did you just wake me with a kiss?” she whispered.

“It was necessary,” he said. He couldn’t move.  He felt trapped in her eyes; lost in the rise and fall off her chest and held captive by the steady rhythm of her heart. 

“Thank you,” she said, with her eyes roving around his face, as if she was trying to unravel a secret or crack some mysterious code.

Her hand came up to his cheek and her eyes flicked down to his lips. He realised, as a gentle sigh escaped him, that any second now, he would find it  _ necessary _ to kiss her again. 

The doors hissed open, and he felt the spell that bound them break. His rational mind took over. They couldn’t stay here. “Okay. You up to moving?” He leaped up and offered her his hand. 

“Yes, I’m fine. In fact I feel . . . great,” she said. And he thought he heard her murmur, although he couldn’t be completely sure, “I think you might have to kiss me more often.”  


	5. In Sync with the Extraordinary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the Doctor kissed Clara and shared some regeneration energy to save her life, they both feel a little flustered. But what happens next leaves them even more emotionally vulnerable.

“So where are we going now?” Clara said as she hurried after the Doctor. Her lips were still tingling. Her whole  _ body  _ tingled. That had been some kiss. 

But the Doctor, being the Doctor, dashed off and wouldn’t even look at her right now. 

“I need to have a look at the telemetry data I’ve downloaded,” he said as found a door and pushed it open. “Saved desktop. Complete with a secondary temporal inverter.”  

A console room, much smaller than their own, but still recognisable with the central column and many sided console, lay before her. He swivelled a screen projected from the hexagonal panel towards her. Then he attached the data-stick containing the information they’d found in the astro-physics observatory to a node on the console.

“It seems to me, whatever is doing this is deliberately making us feel . . . vulnerable,” he said.

“It’s feeding off our pain?” She stepped closer to get a better view of the screen. 

“Not just pain.” He glanced over at her. “We can trace energy right through the electromagnetic spectrum. From high frequency gamma rays, visible light, right through to very low frequency radio waves. They all have a distinct wave pattern. But what if there’s another kind of energy? One we don’t even think of as energy in the same way as the stuff we can measure?”

“Emotional energy?” If that were the case, it must be getting a good feast, because she felt pretty churned up right now. Standing with her shoulder pressed to his wasn’t helping any. “That makes sense when you think about what it’s been doing, I suppose. Making us feel sadness and fear, love and loss.”  

“Yes, precisely!”

Clara sighed. “What does it want? I mean it’s certainly got our attention, but why?”

The Doctor flicked switches on the console for a moment, and then rubbed his chin. She noticed, idly, a short growth of stubble on his chin. That answered he musings on whether or not he needed to shave. 

“Perhaps,” he said, “what we are seeing isn’t an attack, but a cry for help.”

Clara nodded. It made sense. A cry for help could take many forms. She’d seen enough kids lash out because they were desperate to get someone’s attention. She’d learned she needed to look beneath the surface and take time to unpack what the behaviour really meant, if she wanted to understand and ultimately help.

“Interesting,” he said, frowning at the screen. “The wave-packet was scattered when hit the TARDIS. Look. Before the collision there’s one waveform. After it hit us there are two separate wave-patterns, but they’re out of sync.” He paused for a moment. “Just like us when we were separated in the astro-physics observatory. You were in the same place, just a few seconds ahead of me. Clara, what was it like?”

“Cold. And lonely,” she said. She’d lost track of time while she shivered in the cold. She’d had the feeling he must be close by—she knew he would never leave her if he could help it, but as time stretched on she’d never felt so alone. She shuddered at the memory. Then, he’d kissed her and warmth spread through her soul like the sun on spring morning melting the frost. “Perhaps there is a message in how it’s making us feel?”

He looked down at her. They locked eyes and for a moment she felt a powerful desire to feel his lips on hers again. Not because it was necessary, but because she wanted to kiss him, to hold him and have him hold her close in return. She heard his breath catch. His eyes roved around her face and lingered on her lips. He must feel it too! How could he stand this close to her and look at her like this, yet not understand what it meant? 

Then he moved away and tapped the screen thoughtfully. “This wave-packet was traveling through space and time as a unified being. It hit us and became scattered through the TARDIS systems. I think it’s trying to reintegrate, but it needs help. It’s communicating the only way it knows how, telling us how it feels by using our emotions.” He dashed around the console, suddenly full of energy, gripped by a new idea. He yanked open a panel underneath the console. “We need to find a way to fix the systems by inverting--”

Suddenly Clara felt weary to the tips of her bare toes. “There’s always a crisis, always something to run and hide from, or something to fix!” she said. Anger rose in her chest. It was too much, for him to make her feel this way and then change tack. She couldn’t stand it. Just when they were starting to be emotionally open, he shut down and ran off to  _ fix _ something.

“We can’t go on like this, Doctor,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he said, looking genuinely confused.

“I mean we can’t keep running and hiding from the truth. I can’t, anyway,” she pulled her fingers through her hair. 

He sighed very deeply and turned away from the open inspection panel. “Clara, I want to protect you.” His eyes darted around the room, flitting over her and then dodging back again, as if he hardly dare settle his gaze on her.

“From what?” she demanded. 

He shook his head, but had no answer.

She took a very deep breath, and the confusion of feelings that had been churning about in  her head for months all tumbled out. “I don’t think you are protecting me. You’re protecting yourself.”

Again, he didn’t seem able to speak. He closed his eyes briefly. She immediately hated what she’d said. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him. 

She reached out a hand for his. “I get that, I do. I’m not blaming you. I can spend the rest of my life with you, but you can’t spend the rest of yours with me. I know you. You’re thinking, what’s the point of loving me today, when you’re going to lose me tomorrow?” 

He looked down at their joined hands, as if he couldn’t deny a single word.

She rallied her courage to go on. “The answer is, of course, that you  _ are _ going to lose me. Not tomorrow, maybe not for a very long time, but one day I won’t be here. And what do you want, Doctor, when that day comes? A whole lot of missed opportunities and regrets, or memories of the life we had together?” 

When he spoke, it was in a soft burr. “Do you realise what you would be giving up, to spend your only lifetime with me?”

“You have shown me wonders, Doctor. Taken me places most people don’t even dream of. I’ve been more afraid than I ever thought possible and--” 

He shook his head, and started to speak, but she held up a hand to silence him. “Because of that I’ve been braver than I ever thought I could be.  _ You _ gave me that. Shown me the stars, yes, but you also showed me something else.” She paused, and looked away over his shoulder for a moment before she went on. “I thought love was complicated and difficult, but now I know it’s not complicated at all.” She took a deep breath, and then gazed back at him. “Everything I’ve seen, all that you’ve shown me, it’s nothing compared to the feeling I get when I look into your eyes.” 

“Clara. I’ll be terrible at this. I’ll do everything wrong. I’ll frustrate you. I’ll put you in danger. I’ll forget your birthday and—” 

“You do all that anyway.” 

“But I won’t be able to give you what you need, a home, a life, one day after the other. In the right order. You can’t really want a crazy life with an old fool in his box, flitting around the universe?  That’s who I am. I can’t change that.”

Her tone darkened, just slightly. “Don’t presume, for one minute that you get to decide what I need.”

“You’d give up your ordinary life, for me?” 

“What’s so great about an ordinary life?”

“Well you seemed quite attached to it. School, and Danny and Wednesdays.”

“I thought that’s what I wanted. Then I realised that I could never give you up.” She made a show of squinting at him. “Have you been paying any attention at all for the last few months?”

“I have a du—”

“I don’t care about your duty, or your rules,” she said sharply. “Because there’s something bigger than that, something more powerful than either one of us. I don’t mean some dusty prophecy that got the Time Lords in a twist. I’m talking about what happens when you look into my eyes and say my name. I’m talking about the way it feels when we hold hands. I’m talking about,” she raised herself on her tiptoes and pressed her lips lightly to his. “I’m talking about how this makes us  _ feel _ .”

“Clara,” he whispered, almost helplessly. 

“You can run away from it if you want, but that won’t make it any less true.”

“I don’t want to run away anymore. But I don’t know where to start,” he said. 

“I don’t know either. But, you know what? Remember what you said once, years ago to Alec and Emma? Hold hands. Keep holding hands and don’t let go. That’s where we start. Because that’s the magic, right there.”

#

He took her hand and laced their fingers together. His other hand found her hip, and he tentatively drew her closer. She looked up at him, with her pupils blown large, so large he thought he would fall into them. Her cheekbones were tinged red, flushed in a way that made her look so coy, so beautiful, standing in his arms in the long red dress. 

“Can you feel it, Doctor?” she whispered. 

He could feel it. Every part of him felt it, a palpable energy making him tingle from his head to his toes in a whirl of anticipation. His hearts fluttered and his stomach flipped over. He knew, from the deepest part of his soul, that if he kissed her now, he would be done for. He’d never want to stop. 

She seemed to sense his uncertainty. “We’re cut from the same cloth, you and I. Somehow we found each other. Imagine that, of all the doorsteps you could have dropped onto, you ended up on mine. The forces bringing us together. Well, I think we complete each other.”

“Soul mates?” he laughed a little. He had never believed that. Until now.

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know. I do know you make me more than I was. You helped me find myself.” She was a beacon in the dark, a light at the beginning of all things. 

“I want this,” she said. “I want  _ you. _ ”

“Clara, I haven’t. I mean . . .” he made a clucking noise at the back of his throat to hide the fluster he suddenly felt. This was the most embarrassing thing he’d had to admit for a good long while. “This is difficult. I haven’t been intimate with anyone, not since I changed. I don’t know—”

She hushed him with a light kiss. “If there are things to discover, new territories to map out, then we’ll do it together.”

A wave of relief and gratitude flooded through him. Tentatively he brought his lips closer to hers, and she kissed him gently, delicately, letting him find her, and explore the sheer joy of her lips, the sweetness of her mouth on his. Nothing to be afraid of here, her heart seemed to tell to him.

“I love you,” she whispered. “And I choose you. A hundred lifetimes, or one, I’d still choose you.” Her soft smile seemed filled with kindness and hope. “You don’t need to say it back. We both know. Let’s fix this. Then we can have that dinner and talk.”

He nodded, trying to focus on the screen when all he wanted to do was sweep her up in his arms and kiss her again. He cleared his throat. “Okay. There were two spikes in the data just after the wave-packet hit. One in the console room and the other in your bedroom. See this?” He pointed at the graph where the lines peaked. “We need to track the precise location of those spikes.”

As he spoke, the time rotor ground to a halt with a terrible groan, spluttered, and then continued its laboured rise and fall. 

“That didn’t sound good! Can you narrow down the source of those spikes?” She gasped.

He was so acutely aware of her presence next to him that it took a Herculean effort to keep his eyes on the screen. 

“Yes. Look, there’s where the wave hit. But the data spike is before that.” He calculated the time between the spike and the impact. “What were we doing twenty four seconds before the wave-packet hit?”

“Getting ready. I had just put this dress on.” The TARDIS jolted underfoot. 

He blinked a few times to bring his attention back to the problem in hand. “I was waiting for you. I took your note off the console, and—”

“Show me that note again.” She was forced to shout now as the engines strained and groaned.

He took the fluorescent sticky note from his pocket and passed it to her.

“This  _ is _ my handwriting. But I didn’t write it.”

“And you say that dress was hung up for you. But I didn’t do that . . .” He glanced at the red dress. He would never presume to choose her clothes—he barely presumed to choose his own, they just sort of came together in an absent minded scramble—but if he was going to choose a dress to make her look more stunning than ever, this would be it. 

They looked at one another, and she said, “We haven’t done these things  _ yet _ .”

“Of course! Those two things, the dress and the note, are the fixed points, because they contain so much potential emotional energy. They represent us stopping to sit down and talk, something we’ve established that we really need to do,” he said. “I think if we reset the initial conditions and I use the temporal inverters we can reintegrate the wave-packet and send it back on its way.”

“But won’t that send  _ us _ back too? What’s to stop this happening all over again in an endless loop?”

“I’ll leave myself a message to not to uncouple the  co-regulation capacitor from the dimensional shift circuitry. That should prevent the temporal anomaly. Look, we have to hurry.” He did a quick systems check, and to his horror found the TARDIS preparing to eject rooms at random. “Uh oh.”

“What?”

“The fail-safes to ensure the TARDIS never ejects rooms containing life-signs is inactive.” He muttered a Gallifreyan curse under his breath. 

“Great. So we could get scrambled into the time vortex any minute?”

“We need to hurry. We have to reset the initial conditions.”

“And will we go back to the way we were before? We won’t forget all the things we’ve said, will we?” she couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice. 

“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know what we will remember from today.” He didn’t want to forget. He wanted to know what happened next. He wanted to turn to the next chapter, not go back to the start of the book. But the roar of the pained time rotor gave him little choice.  

“We need to get the note and the dress back into their initial positions, before the TARDIS shakes herself apart. Then I’ll activate the cascade that will reset the temporal anomaly.”

They ran together from the old console room. The walls shook and shuddered as they set off towards her bedroom. Without warning, an explosion knocked them both off their feet, scattering shards of plastic and debris across the floor.

“Clara!” he sheltered her from the sharp debris with his back. 

“I’m okay,” she said. She rubbed her leg, and then looked at the floor, covered in sharp fragments of wall and dust. 

She’d never pass that way in her bare feet. “Is there another way to my room?”

The Doctor shook his head. “No time. You take these to the console room, the way should be clear and its closer. I’ll take the dress.” He passed her two notes, her original one and another, in his own hand.

_ Doctor Disco, do not, under any circumstances, uncouple the co-regulation capacitor while wearing a black dinner suit _ . 

“Put that on the console near the door switch, and the other one on the panel below it to the left,” he told her.

She looked down at the note. “Well, that’s easy enough. But I’m—” She waved her hand up and down the dress.

Gods, he realised, the dress. She would have to take it off if he was to deliver it to her room.

“What? Um. Okay,” he said. “Here, take this.” His hands shook as he took his jacket off and unbuttoned his shirt. He felt her eyes on his bare chest. It sent a thrill through him. He just couldn’t deny it any more. He didn’t want to deny it anymore. Life was too precious, to short, to waste it wondering what might have been. He might end up in hell, but did that mean he couldn’t taste heaven on the way?

She let the red dress slip to the floor, like a crimson rose blooming around her feet, and then took his shirt from him and slipped it on. As she buttoned up the shirt he stooped to pick up the dress. She rested a hand on his shoulder for balance as she stepped out of it.

He gathered it up and for a moment he stood awkwardly holding the fabric loosely in his fingers. She turned to him then, and placed a flat hand on his chest. A rumbling growl escaped his lips, and although there was no time, and the TARDIS was rocking and juddering around them, he clutched the white shirt at her waist and used the bunched fabric to pull her to him. 

One kiss. There was time for one kiss. He kissed her hungrily, as if she was the air he needed to breathe. He felt her breath catch and he was sure the trembling was not just the chaos around them, but a riot of emotions in her chest. 

“Hurry,” she said, “And come back to me like this, remembering this. Every single feeling. Every single word.” She kissed him again and then she was gone, dashing off to the console room. With one last look at her receding form, he turned and ran to her bedroom.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finished the story, so I'm going to post the final chapter today as well.


	6. Remember Us

 

Time heals all wounds and time tears everything apart. Time is relative, and plays tricks on the unwary, dilating to drag out dull Tuesday afternoons and compressing precious, joyous moments into a blink of an eye.

Sometimes, great love stories, too tragic and beautiful to be contained in one dimension spill over. They create a cosmic harmonic that thunders through the universe. Perhaps the wave-packet that found its way onto the TARDIS was one story, infinitely powerful and gloriously unstoppable.

Imagine this: at the end of days Clara Oswald returns to the Trap Street. Her soul is finally set free. Consider also, that when the gold light burns this Doctor to make a new man, his soul will be free at last to find hers. A new harmonic will be created: twisting and turning infinitely through time and space, full of raw power and passion, a love story too big to be defined in conventional terms. So it will fly free through space and time. Until one day it bumps into its own creation myth. What would such a creature do when scattered, unable to communicate in conventional terms, knowing only it must be unified once more? It would write its own story. Create itself.

Whatever it was that found its way into the TARDIS that day screamed a thousand deaths when it was scattered, and cried an ocean of tears while the perfect whole remained split in two.

An ecstasy of blue light flashed through the TARDIS. Two scattered forms became one again. They continued their eternal journey through the cosmos, passing through, learning, blissfully ever after. Together, always.

#

Clara blinked three times and put her hand to the wall to steady herself. She reached down expecting to feel the cotton of the Doctor’s shirt she’d put on moments before, but found herself wrapped in a towel. The red dress hung on the outside of her wardrobe. The reassuring stillness of the TARDIS at rest all around her filled the room.

It worked. It must have worked. The last thing she remembered was running barefoot into the console room, sticking the notes where he told her before a cacophony of flashing blue light blotted out her senses. Then she’d opened her eyes and found herself here.  She stood in her room, freshly showered in front of the red dress. She scrambled into it, flung on shoes, and ran to the control room, saying to herself over and over, _Let him remember too_.

He stood at the console, looking at a monitor showing strange patterns of energy travelling through the universe. He seemed lost in thought. He was dressed in an immaculate black suit. He looked up. “About time,” he said.

“Doctor!” Can you—”

He smiled, enigmatically, infuriatingly, and before she could finish her sentence he whisked her out of the door and into the restaurant.

Her heart sank and her hopes faltered. Had he forgotten? Was he _pretending_ he couldn’t remember because it was all too much? He’d had his emotional range uncomfortably stretched and he wanted to reset it back to the size of a soup spoon.

The restaurant was dark, and when she looked up she saw an open starscape filled with breath-taking colours and twinkling silver-blue stars.  

“Oh,” she said, as he took her hand and lead her onto the starlit dance floor. An alien orchestra played a haunting tune, with a gentle rhythm that she didn’t recognise. A few other customers danced in pairs, and moved with strange, complicated steps across the dance floor. She felt disoriented.

“Nice choice of restaurant,” he said.

She looked closely at his freshly-shaven face and caught a breath of an exotic cologne. “You look nice,” she said, falteringly. She held back the urge to touch his chin, and run her hand across the smooth skin there.

“So do you,” he said. He rested his hand on her shoulder and took a tiny pinch of fabric between his thumb and forefinger. “Nice dress.”

He pinned her with his eyes and her heart fluttered. What did he remember? She felt her face flushing hot with a desperate mix of hope and nerves. She didn’t have the first clue what to say.

Then he swept her around in front of him and slipped a hand to her waist.  “I think we should dance,” he whispered into her ear. “If you want to.”

“I want to,” she said, glancing nervously around. “I’m just not sure I know how.” The couples around her seemed to know a sequence of moves and dips that were alien to her. More than that, though, she didn’t know what to expect from him.

“That’s alright,” he said, gazing deeply into her eyes. “If there are things to discover, new territories to map out, then we’ll do it together.”

“You remember?” she whispered, hope rising anew in her chest.

His stormy eyes seemed to sparkle. “Everything. Every single feeling and every single word.” He pulled her towards him.

She melted into his arms. He pressed his lips to hers. She shuddered very slightly as anticipation flooded through her. This was no kiss to transfer life-saving energy, although she felt it might just have saved her life. Time seemed to standstill. A vision of the future stretched before her. With him. With the Doctor, travelling through time and space. All she wanted, all she needed, was here in her arms in this most perfect moment under the glorious stars.

“You want me?” She let the music carry her away. “You want us to be together even though--”

“I can’t run away anymore. Nothing lasts forever. But . . . I can’t be sure, but it seemed to me. . .” He paused and glanced back towards the TARDIS before he went on. “One day, the spacedust of me will find your wandering soul, and we’ll become more than we ever thought we could be. Until then, let’s cherish every moment.”

He pulled her closer and kissed her deeply, until she was breathless in his arms.

“I love you,” he whispered. “And I choose you. In a hundred lifetimes, always and forever,  I choose you.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story you might also enjoy Time Shadows 2: Second Nature, an unofficial charity anthology featuring all 12 incarnations of the Doctor plus the War Doctor. Available to print on demand. Digital download to be released soon.
> 
> {{{Hint the Twelfth Doctor and Clara story 'Divergence' by Kate Coleman is rather good}}}}
> 
> http://pseudoscopepublishing.com/timeshadows/

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Two Souls, Forever Dancing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11293980) by [Professor_Saber](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Professor_Saber/pseuds/Professor_Saber)




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